Garlic Bread (with a Twist)

Last night, I was in the mood for garlic. I mean, REALLY in the mood for garlic. I love the stuff. So I decided to make some garlic bread.

Trouble was, I had no suitable bread. I’d have to bake some. And since I was already going to have to make the dough, rise it, bake it, and so on, I thought: why not bake the garlic right in?

So. I whipped up a large batch of French bread dough by kneading together 2 cups bread flour, four cups all-purpose flour, two packets (4.5 tsp) of active dry yeast, one tablespoon kosher salt, one tablespoon dried herbs, one teaspoon of sugar and two and a half cups of warm water (the water, sugar and yeast hung out in a measuring cup to get foamy before being added to the dry stuff). Let that rise for about an hour till it doubled.

In the meantime, I melted about a stick of salted butter and threw in just about a whole head’s worth of garlic cloves and cooked them till they looked like this:

Then I smashed up my cooked cloves into a paste, like this:

and returned that paste to the pan to mix with the lovely, garlicky butter:

When the dough had doubled in size, I rolled it out like I would for cinnamon rolls, into a large rectangle, and brushed on the butter and garlic so that it covered the whole expanse of dough:

Then rolled it up into a log, which I curled into a sort of snail-shell shape:

I then oiled a springform pan and moistened the top of the dough with oil, too, so it wouldn’t form a crust while rising.

It rose:

And then baked in a 350 degree oven for almost an hour (a full hour would have been best but my kids were extremely impatient to eat this and bedtime was fast approaching, so I pulled it out as soon as I could without feeding them raw dough).

You could certainly use less garlic–this is REALLY garlicky–or you could use only the butter the garlic cooked in and reserve the cloves for something else. You could also mix that garlicky butter into your favorite enriched dough recipe to infuse the garlic flavor. Anyhow, this bread is yummy on its own or dipped in marinara. It’s going to give you garlic breath, but here’s a tip: eat a chunk of mozzarella cheese (like a string cheese) when you’re finished, and most if not all of that odor will disappear.